SiocLog: Providing IRC Discussion Logs as Linked Data

SiocLog: Providing IRC Discussion Logs as Linked Data Tuukka Hastrup 1 , Uldis Bojars 2 and John G. Breslin 2, 3 1 University of Jyväskylä, Finland 2 DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland 3 School of Engineering and Informatics, NUI Galway, Ireland

Motivation
IRC conversations are quite disconnected from the Web and even from other IRC channels and networks
Often there is valuable and needed information in an IRC chat that cannot be linked to people, topics or events, or in general referenced from elsewhere
This may be useful to people who do not use IRC, by those on other networks, or simply by people who leave and rejoin a channel

Motivation (2)
SIOC provides a framework for linking social media contributions to other content and Linked Data resources, and IRC can become part of that framework
We also need mechanisms to link the IRC contributions to the people who made them, hence the use of Web ID

Background
We will begin by introducing the various areas relevant to this system:
IRC
Linked Data
SIOC
Web ID

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
Instant messaging / internet chat is a major form of social interaction online
It is often disconnected from the Web:
Due to the different protocols involved
Due to its real-time nature / lack of persistent storage
IRC was one of the earliest chat systems
It has an important role amongst open-source communities, web communities, and even geeks!
Hundreds of thousands of users online at any time

Linked Data
Building a “Web of Data” to enhance the current Web
Exposing, sharing and connecting data about things via dereferenceable URIs
Linking datasets together that were not previously connected, for example:
Music and people
Real-world things and places
The Linking Open Data (LOD) effort aims to link various open datasets together (DBpedia, GeoNames, etc.)

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)
An effort from DERI, NUI Galway to discover how we can create / establish ontologies on the Semantic Web
Goal of the SIOC ontology is to address interoperability issues on the (Social) Web
http://sioc-project.org/
SIOC has been adopted in a framework of 50 applications or modules deployed on over 400 sites
Various domains: Web 2.0, enterprise information integration, HCLS, e-government

Some of the SIOC core ontology classes and properties

Some examples of where SIOC is already use (about 50 implementations / applications)

Web ID
A Web ID is a web address that identifies a person as a Linked Data item
A Web ID should also lead to a document with more information about that person (e.g. FOAF, other RDF)
For more information, see the definition in this paper:
Ching-Man Au Yeung, Ilaria Liccardi, Kanghao Lu, Oshani Seneviratne, Tim Berners-Lee, “ Decentralization: The Future of Online Social Networking ”, W3C Workshop on Future of Social Networking

Design

Mapping IRC identifiers to URIs on the Web
irc://freenode
(IRC Network)
irc://freenode/%23 channel
(Channel)
No identifier
(Message)
irc://freenode/ persona ,isuser
(Chat Persona)
http://irc.sioc-project.org/#freenode
http://irc.sioc-project.org/ channel #channel
http://irc.sioc-project.org/ channel /0000-00-00 #00:00:00.00
http://irc.sioc-project.org/users/ persona #user

Some of the internal and external links

Browsing the Linked Data

Creating a link between a user account on IRC and a personal profile
Claiming a Web ID creates a link [black] between a user account (a sioc:User that created a sioc:Post in a sioct:ChatChannel) and a person (foaf:Person)
The person can manually verify this:
By pointing back to the sioc:User from their foaf:Person definition [grey]

Web IDs in SiocLog
A Web ID can be claimed using mttlbot
Can claim using standard IRC services
/msg nickserv
set property webid SomeWebID

Implementation
2000 lines of Python source code
1000 lines of Zope/TAL HTML templates
Twisted, SimpleTAL and Redland libraries
Four major components:
IRC interface, data analysis, data integration, Web

Implementation (2)
IRC interface:
Discussion logger / persona monitor on Twisted
Data analysis:
Process logs, a filters pipeline, sinks for stats / output
Data integration:
Queries for external Linked Data (personal profiles)
Web interface:
Requests via CGI, publishes as HTML and RDF

Finding the names of friends of an IRC persona with SPARQL
semwebquery –sparql "SELECT ?name WHERE {
?person foaf:holdsAccount
<http://irc.sioc-project.org/users/melvster#user> .
?person foaf:knows ?friend .
?friend foaf:name ?name . }"

Validation
291 chat personas on five channels
22,418 chat messages
51 chat personas have associated Web IDs claimed using mttlbot (2/3) or nickserv (1/3)
44 of those have a valid associated RDF document
Scalable (projected 4 million triples in 10 years)
SiocLog data being consumed by the “Towards linked sensor data for Hackystat” project
SiocLog interfaces to FOAF Me for new profile creation

Future work
Extend to instant messaging and private messaging
Study of IRC communities where users and content are distributed across channels and networks

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Science Foundation Ireland for their support under grant SFI/08/CE/I1380 (Líon 2)
Thanks also to Benja Fallenstein and Dan Brickley for their insights

Summary
IRC conversations are quite disconnected from the Web and even from other IRC channels and networks
Often there is valuable and needed information in an IRC chat that cannot be linked to people, topics or events, or in general referenced from elsewhere
SIOC provides a framework for interlinking social media to other content and Linked Data, and IRC has been integrated as a part of that framework
We also used mechanisms to link IRC contributions to the people who made them via Web ID and FOAF

SiocLog: Providing IRC Discussion Logs as Linked Data

by John Breslin on Oct 26, 2009

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SiocLog: Providing IRC Discussion Logs as Linked Data — Presentation Transcript